Sylvia Wynter

The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations of humanness. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis is a critical genealogy of Wynter’s work, highlighting her insights on how race, location, and time together inform what it means to be human. The contributors explore Wynter’s stunning reconceptualization of the human in relation to concepts of blackness, modernity, urban space, the Caribbean, science studies, migratory politics, and the interconnectedness of creative and theoretical resistances. The collection includes an extensive conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick that delineates Wynter’s engagement with writers such as Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire, among others; the interview also reveals the ever-extending range and power of Wynter’s intellectual project,  and elucidates her attempts to rehistoricize humanness as praxis.

"[On] Being Human as Praxis is a major contribution to growing efforts to bring Sylvia Wynter’s critical thought to the fore of contemporary critical social theory. The collection secures Wynter’s status as a heretical intellectual insisting on the relevance of the radical Black/Caribbean decolonial tradition to the systemic crises of the early 21st century planet." , "In their combination, and in their resonance with Wynter’s intricate and expansive opening meditation on race, science, and human being, these essays present a complex and coherent intellectual project, at once deeply rooted and generously rhizomic."

Katherine McKittrick is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.